DxO PhotoLab 9.6 Windows & Mac Review: Compressed DNGs, XD3 For All, and Fewer Crashes?
Is this the build we've been waiting for?
Note: this is the director’s cut of my Photolab 9.6 review going into greater depth than the YouTube edition.
Y
es, hot on the heels of the release of the excellent PureRAW 6, DxO have pushed the latest version of PhotoLab out of the front door, to make its own way in the world and stand on its own two feet.
The 9.0 release brought us such goodies as AI masks, local adjustments for DeepPRIME noise reduction and Lens Sharpness Optimisation, HEIC/HEIF and ProRAW support, the DeepPRIME XD3 denoise model, batch renaming and image stacking.
Unfortunately, on Windows at least, that 9.0 build was a bit of a clusterfuck with an Nvidia GPU bug that rendered those eagerly anticipated AI masks largely useless for anyone with, you know, a graphics card. And DxO dragged their feet on fixing it too, with Windows users on the official DxO forum still raising complaints about the bugs over six months later.
So now we have the 9.6 release, officially flagged by DxO as including fixes for the bugs introduced in that 9.0 release. Have DxO finally got their act together? Does 9.6 finally come good on its original promises, or is it still a long way from perfect?
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Also published in RAW & Unfiltered on Substack.
